In this serene and playful film, the Russian metropolis of St. Petersburg is shown in all its visual splendour. A man (a wonderfully understated role by Viktor Sukorukov) leaves hospital with a bandage round his head. He traipses the streets of the city looking for a room and asking around. The woman who has a room for him also gives him a name: Sergei Sergeyevich he doesn’t know his own name any more. He meets a frail blond woman who turns out to be aprostitute. When she says she is pregnant by him, he wonders what’s the point.More important than the story of Happy Days is the way in which it is told: in refined yet coarse black & white images which evoke a different world, a world of insanity and tragic heroism. ‘Alexei Balabanov has stylized what there has never been: a St. Petersburg of the early European absurd, a St. Petersburg of Beckett and early Buñuel. I know of no other home-made motion picture as perfect and precise as this.’ (Moscow News).
